I'm sorta ambivalent about this, but mr. Kotick really should work on his wording. My first initial impression was that he said "People like these movies so much, that from now on, we'll sell them separately. If you want your SC2 cutscene, you better fork over some dough.".

When he says "remove", does that mean that the cutscenes are actually gone from the game unless you buy the game+movie bundle? Because his quote was either that or a rather poor choice of words: it's kinda the undercurrent of what hes saying.

It looks like Kotick is trying to reduce the Cost : Content ratio of games even further. I'm surprised the man even bothered putting on a PR release all those months ago if all he was going to do was piss all over that goodwill.

Nevermind that the gaming industry I once knew will be naught but a dead husk in 5 years when mandatory-subscription gaming takes over, turning most (if not all) big titles into World of Warcraft money machines while offering absolutely no real lasting power in return.

But it's shit like this though that makes me saddest of all, because I know that there are a lot of assholes out there who will gladly pay that 20-30 bucks (2-5 times the going rate of any Hollywood movie in theatres) for the movies.

The market adjusts itself. As long as people are willing to give more and more for less and less, they have nobody to blame but themselves. They have no right to complain because that's precisely what they agreed to.

EDIT: I have detected some ambiguity in Mr Kotick's statement.Is he saying that he wants to strip out the cutscenes in games (as in, remove the content from the game completely?) and sell them to the gamer at a premium?Or is he just suggesting to resell the movies (copying them out of the game) as a stand-alone product?

Because it's just way to hard for me to install Fraps and record every single cutscene in a game. Even easier, I can go to YouTube and watch the cutscenes on the channel of someone that recorded them themselves. Yeah, not a good idea Kotick.

lapan:So, the games itself will not have cutscenes anymore and whoever wants to watch them has to pay? I myself do not like this and wouldnt buy such uncomplette games. Though i know many people who just dislike cutscenes in general and will probably like their new cutscene-less games.

No, they would still be in the game. It's just if you for some reason REALLY liked the cut scenes, you could buy them as a standalone item to watch whenever you wanted.

I guess Bobby-boy thinks that developers make the gamer, and not the other way around. I can see this kind of thing being included in collectors edition or something, but as a standard feature? pffft - there is absolutely no game mechanic/play worth $60 with zero story/narrative.

SC II and MW 2 probably got him thinking about this, since so many gamers just jumped right into multiplayer and never even touched the single player campaign.

Anyway, Bobby, bring it on. Try and sell Diablo III (or Blizzards new MMO) with no narrative, and I will have absolutely no problem not buying it - simple as that.

lapan:So, the games itself will not have cutscenes anymore and whoever wants to watch them has to pay? I myself do not like this and wouldnt buy such uncomplette games. Though i know many people who just dislike cutscenes in general and will probably like their new cutscene-less games.

No, they are copying the cut scenes and making them into a movie. Notice the term copy, not cut.

Blizzard has done this before. The WCIII super-ultra hardcore-box set had a DVD of all the cut scenes included (along with a cool map of the world (of Warcraft) and an interesting book of beta sketches).

Hell, I still have my WCIII DVD. Not like I ever watched it other than to figure out what it was.

I'm not sure why people are upset here. Choice of words aside, he's simply talking about marketing a game's cutscenes as a movie, not totally removing them from the game. It's not entirely unprecidented:

MGS3's collector's edition came with a DVD of the cutscenes as a movie.Preordering Xenosaga 2 got you a DVD of Xenosaga 1's cut scenes as a movie.I've seen bootlegs out of hong kong for the cutscenes for Final Fantasy 10, and online fan projects for the metal gear series and kingdom hearts (probably more).

People buy TV shows that are in syndication so they can watch what they want when they want to and I can see some people doing the same for games depending on the scene and the circumsances of getting it. Do I really want to play through half of Kingdom Hearts to re-watch a scene near the end of it, or re-play something teidious (say episode 3 of MGS4) to watch the cut scenes after it? Youtube? Copyright law. 20 - 30 dollars? Exactly how many hours of cutscenes are we getting? A lot of game cinematics (especialy for story based games) run longer than the typical 90 minute movie run time.

This will only work for some games. They need to be story based and well scripted. I don't see much from Activision that fits. Call me when Square Enix has the same idea.

Here's a few questions I have for Kotick:1. Would these cutscenes actually be removed from the game? In other words, if I bought the game I would get no cutscenes? Lame.

2. How do you intend to make the cutscenes flow without the intervening gameplay? I know just watching the cutscenes from Armed and Dangerous is still funny, but they lose some of the context. Likewise with games like FF X, Timesplitters: Future Perfect, and many others.

You can't do that! What if you did that on a game like Metal gear Solid 4 then the playtime would be cut down to about 15 minutes. Cutscenes are part of a game and removing them to use for a movie would make the game incomplete.. who the fuck would buy an incomplete game. This tyrant must be stopped at all costs.